The Rings of Akhaten: The Doctor’s Speech
“The Rings of Akhaten” began as a rather traditional Doctor Who adventure. He plucks Clara, his young, wide-eyed, quick-witted new friend from her everyday life and takes her on an adventure to a far away play to see “something awesome”.
The episode gets good. Clara helps a young girl in distress, relating to her with ease tying into her life as a nanny and past life as a governess. Further establishing her character’s natural empathetic qualities will also help us understand why she’s so drawn to the Doctor, who so clearly needs some taking care of and how she will be able to understand him, even a bit.
And then the typical Doctor shouty speech turns into something more. Usually he does this for an audience for effect, using his words as a weapon to induce fear usually, shame, to convince the baddies to stand down. This is something else. This is the Doctor speaking to someone like he has never been able to before, at least in recent memory.
An overarching theme in Doctor Who, in the modern incarnation, is that he is an incredibly lonely man – alone even when he has companions to love and trust and whom he shares his adventures with. Even then he knows they are only passing through in his vast, long life. He carries with him the weight of 900 years, wars and death and darkness he cannot even begin to figure out how to share.
This battle with Grandfather becomes something of a strange therapy session for the Doctor. He talks about the loneliness and the terrible memories he carries with him. He cries as he admits out loud how painful these memories are and how he lives with these every day. Memories and experiences so painful he believes that this knowledge will fell a god.
Matt Smith carries this beautifully as the shouty speech turns to tears and he never stops – carrying the momentum of the moment. Even as the episode explores the value of memories and ghosts that we carry with us the tone up until this point is a relatively light Doctor-adventure. This emotional moment turns this on a dime while remaining perfectly in place within the episode. This story was set up beautifully to simultaneously explore some of the past Clara has left behind throughout and allow the Doctor to unload some of his baggage in a surprising finale.
What did you think? Was the Doctor’s speech different than those we’ve seen before – maybe foreshadowing of something we’ll see this season?
it’s the first time Matt Smith brought me to tears.
I read somewhere from some of the many comments about that episode that
it was almost like a Regeneration episode, but at the same time it
obviously wasn’t. I look at The Doctor sometimes and I wonder: just how
much more can this person take? You know? He is the last of a long-lived
highly advanced species and was never really one of them to begin with:
and he watched all these other species–“lesser species”–make
something and become something beautiful together.
For all there are Daleks and Cybermen, there are things like that bitter-sweet world and that glorious story-telling song ceremony. You could just see how moved
he was then. And because and despite these Regenerations, The Doctor is
changing as a character. He always is, but I feel he really is now. It’s
almost like he’s … growing up: if that makes sense. Anyway, I do
thing this is going to foreshadow some awesomeness and pathos. I both
can’t wait and fear for where this is going to go.
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